Look at the Harlequins! (1974, this edition 1990) is Vladimir Nabokov’s last book.
Vadim Vadimovich N. is the narrator and he is dying, so he pens his autobiography. He is a Russian-American poet and author writing his last book. He writes about his four wives, all the books he has written, the places he has lived (Berlin, Paris and America), and his illness. And, in between the narratives are a few poems.
Of Paris, where Vadim lived for many years, he neither loves nor hates it: … ‘I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.’
The narrator is sixty and his thoughts are semi-structured and semi-rambling. He doesn’t always remember details. Instead, he remembers parts of conversations, and feelings and loss.
The links between Vadim, the character, and Vladmir, the author, are intertwined, so it reads as though Nabokov is writing of his own life. Both character and author were born in 1899 in St. Petersburg, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, lived in the same countries, wrote books, and became literary stars.
The mirror-image of a character-author is often serious, mostly mocking, sometimes similar, often deliberately opposite, yet revealing little. The novel, the autobiography, is a play, a pun, on imagination and reality.
This novel can be read without a wide knowledge of the real Nabokov and his books, but readers may gain more from the novel if they something about Vladimir Nabokov. I studied Russian literature at university, and read every word of this book. I enjoyed it.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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